Diamond Girl

Chapter 20



Michael and I became a couple - a couple! I’d never been one half of one of those before, and being coupled with Michael was the single greatest experience of my life.

For our second date, as he insisted on calling it, which I didn’t like since in my mind we’d already moved past dating, even though I’d only met him the day before, he took me to this horrible, grungy club in outer hell, aka New Jersey, a place the native New Yorker tends to avoid like toxic waste dumps. I think they also have a lot of them in New Jersey and that is why the grass is an almost luminescent green, hence the name the ‘Garden State.’

Not all of New Jersey is a pit by any means. Princeton is pretty and there are a lot of other decent parts. That’s why so many people with money, both old and new, live there. Heck, my crazy great-uncle, former husband of the Dominican maid, had once tried to buy New Jersey. Apparently his neighbors had objected to him covering the forty-eight thousand square foot love palace he had built - his version of the Jersey Taj Mahal - all in barbed wire. My uncle said it was to discourage intruders. His very rich but not-as-rich neighbors said it was a worse eyesore than a giant roadside ball of twine and lobbied to have the barbed wire removed. My uncle reacted as reasonably as he did to all requests and responded by trying to buy New Jersey. It wasn’t for sale and years of bitterness ensued.

I used to be embarrassed by that story when I was a little girl, but Daddy told me that old families are not as interesting without at least one real ‘cuckoo in the nest‘ and told me the story of one of the Du Pont family members trying to become an eagle. The old wacko even moved an eagle’s nest into his home and lived in it for a year. Now there is a really awesome nature preserve in his name and my own crazy uncle’s barbed wire palace is presently a golfing facility, so everything turned out fine for the people of New Jersey.

That part of New Jersey is not where Michael took me. He took me to Bergenfield and to a bar/club called Death You.

To make the evening more of an adventure, Michael didn't drive us to Bergenfield and Death You; we took the train.

When he picked me up at my apartment, he laughed when he saw my clothes. Wanting to show him a more sophisticated side than the disastrous dress I’d met him in, I was wearing a red pleated Bottega Veneta strapless and a really beautiful pair of forties style suede pumps from their line. I don’t know what I thought our night was going to entail, maybe dinner at some ironic retro place like 107 West where you could eat fried chicken for a hundred and ten a serving. After all, he had said he liked old school. I had planned my look with an eye to that kind of night.

He cracked up on the phone when I offered to arrange a car for us and said we’d be walking, so I had thought, oh, something along the lines of a nearby restaurant and a romantic stroll home. Maybe I would be able to find a grate and do a little Marilyn Monroe pirouette for him, which is why I had chosen that particular fifties style full-skirted look. I loved Marilyn Monroe and had always planned to have New York nights like the ones in the 'Seven Year Itch' as soon as I met the right guy, which he was, he totally was.

But, as in the beginning of any relationship, until you learn each other’s tastes, you make mistakes. Michael had envisioned a very particular kind of movie night date too.

It’s just his mojo was more This is Spinal Tap or Harold and Kumar go to White Castle than say, Gentlemen Prefer Blonds or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. His clothes might have given away the awesome surprise he had in store for me but they didn’t because, back then, all the Upper East Side boys were wearing standard prep by day and their sad wannabe version of gangsta grunge by night.

So his designer sags and leather coat didn’t tip me off. All I thought when I saw him was that he was even better than I had remembered from seeing him early that morning, and he smelled so good, and when he saw me he looked at me like he couldn’t decide whether to kiss me or laugh at my outfit.

He did both, and that part, the kiss in the doorway where his tongue dialed up my mouth and my nerve endings, and his long beefy body pressed against mine, made me think that we could stay in after all.

But then he said. “Jesus, you are pretty. I don’t know what you’re wearing, but no one will care since you’re so much fun to look at.”

“What do you mean, what I’m wearing? This is a Bot … uh … just a dress. Aren’t we going out? I mean, Gawd I don’t care, we can stay in. I don’t think I have anything to eat in the house but I can call …”

“We are def going out and I can see it’s a dress. I just wondered if you wanted to wear that to Death You, but now I want you to wear it and, Carey, if you have panties on, leave them at home, okay?”

I didn’t care if Death You was going to be some nasty not-yet-hot club in the meat packing district or in Harlem, I only knew that he thought I was pretty and he wanted me to take off my panties. I rose up my skirt and showed him my Strumpet and Pink knickers, purchased just two hours earlier.

People say that British people don’t like sex but, given the lingerie they make, I can’t agree with that. Michael wouldn’t have either. He was panting a little. “Oh man, how do these ties work?”

“Oh and I thought you were a smart boy.”

“I am and I have good teeth too.” He had great teeth, white and sharp, so he was able to bite through the laces pretty easily. I didn’t care. If he liked them - and he did, he did - I would just order fifty more pairs.

I thought for sure we wouldn’t get outside after that, but he was on a mission, and when I realized he was dragging me toward the subway to make a connection at Grand Central, I started sulking and dragging my feet, asking where we were going.

He pulled me close to him. “We are going, my naïve Manhattan child, to the wilds of New Jersey, Bergenfield to be exact, and that is why we have to take the train. The neighborhood where the band I want to look at is playing is too shady for me to want to leave my car there. It would be stripped before we got back to it.”

I thought about that and tried to be helpful. I was only trying to show him that I could be flexible. “We could take one of my cars.”

“Baby, I’m trying to kind of blend in with the crowd there. It’s bad enough that I’m walking in with a girl that looks like you, I mean, you’re no Jersey girl, but we can’t show up in a limo, Jesus.”

“No, I didn’t mean a limo. I have cars, regular cars, two of them. They’re in the garage next to my apartment. It would be fun to take one. They’ve never been driven. I don’t know how to drive yet, so they just sit there. If one gets stolen tonight, that’s okay. I’m positive they’re insured.”

We were at the entrance to the subway when I said it, and he stopped cold and looked down at me like I was speaking Greek. “You have two cars and you don’t know how to drive? Why do you have one car, let alone two?”

“Oh well, one’s not a car, it’s like an SUV thingy, and I didn’t buy them, Gawd. Daddy got me the SUV thing, I think it’s a Range Rover, for my birthday when I was fifteen. He thought it would be a really safe car to learn to drive in. Then this year for my birthday, he gave me the Porsche. I think he forgot about the first one and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, and I am going to learn how to drive soon. Maybe we should take the old one if it’s going to be stolen. The Porsche is so pretty and how would I explain to Daddy?”

He shook his head and guided me down towards the dirty escalator. “I don’t know. I have no idea how you’d explain it, Carey. We’ll take the subway tonight and maybe this weekend I’ll start teaching you how to drive. Not in the city, we can go out of town.”

I wanted to hug myself with joy but I remembered Milan’s instructions. “That would be cool. We can go up to Tamerlane. There’s a lot of driveway there, hard to hit anything.”

“Is Tamerlane the little weekend place your family has?”

I looked at him curiously. He shrugged, not meeting my eyes.

“You know who my family is, Michael. Is that going to make things weird?”

He laughed. “No, I mean I could care less where you come from. I’m just into the girl and, anyway, I’m not exactly poverty-stricken and I’m going to be seriously loaded one day. That’s why we’re going to Jersey tonight. There’s a band I want to have a look at. I’m starting up my own PR firm, repping talent. Don’t worry, I’m not going to need to borrow money from my new little girlfriend.”

I didn’t answer him; I heard only the part where he used the word 'girlfriend'. I told him I thought subways rocked and they did with him, so did the train ride to Bergenfield. The whole way there I thought about all the things I could do to help him, the people I could introduce him to, all the things I could give him that he deserved to have, that I wanted to give him for picking me.

Death You was pretty bad. Actually, 'pretty bad' doesn’t really begin to describe it. It’s the kind of place where they should offer complimentary hand gel because the bathrooms are so scary. Actually it’s the kind of place they should offer complimentary hep C shots. But it did have the familiar long line out front. Of course everyone in the line looked like they could be waiting at a methadone clinic. There was even a doorman, or a kind of doorman. He had a baseball bat and a tattoo of Courtney Love that covered half his face, but the getting-waved-ahead-of-the-line part was familiar. Inside it was pitch black, thank God, because that way I didn’t have to see it. Smelling it was bad enough.

I acted like it was all good, though, because I was with Michael and I was his girlfriend, the perfect supportive girlfriend standing behind her man in his pursuit of success. The band he was there to look at, Satin Goat, was actually pretty good in a grunge kind of way, and when Michael and I were grinding against each other on the dance floor, I didn’t miss Manhattan.

I even had a beer.

I was a little worried because, since I hadn’t told him about the diabetes yet, I had shot myself up with insulin instead of wearing my pump which regulates my insulin even if I drink, but nothing went wrong that night. We weren’t mugged on the way back to the subway and I even found a grate to stand on for him on the way back to my apartment.

“Look, baby, no panties.”

He picked me up right there on the street and I wrapped my legs around his waist, and later around his neck, and it was the most perfect New York night ever.